Note that ferals are one of the classes that have had the least amount of time spent on their tree. Expect this to change drastically in the near future. Which is good, because as it stands things are totally broken.

Here's some of the things I know about that are broken that need to be addressed at some point in the Cataclysm iteration:

Talents

Tier 1:

Predatory Strikes is a mandatory talent. Not useful at all for bears, and only marginal use for cats.

Tier 2:

Primal Fury is missing the extra combo point generation for cats. So it's a bear only talent.

A bear must take charge or King of the Jungle (which isn't that good unless you're using 4pT10 or they remove the armor loss on enrage) unless they spent all 9 points in tier 2.

Tier 4:

In order to progress, a cat must take one point in nurturing instinct, infected wounds or primal fury.

There's no improved leader of the pack.

Tier 5;

A cat needs to take Survival Instincts to progress. Or natural reaction, I suppose.

Tier 6 and 7 are 'fine', though Rend & Tear has been reduced to a 3 point talent without changing the scaling (so a nerf from 20% to 12%). Nom Nom Nom has stayed in. Berserk is largely useless for bears, but more on that later.

Resto tier 1:

Furor has been changed to a 3 point talent (yay) but the scaling has not changed, so it only does a 60% chance no matter what (boo). Bears can choose between boosting their claw and shred damage by 4% or reducing their shapeshifting costs. Yay.

Resto tier 2:

There is nothing worth getting for cats past furor and blessing of the grove. For bears, they want perseverance. Even then, it's only 8 points total in the tree.

Outstanding bugs:

If you ever had primal precision, you will have 10 expertise.

Combo point generation for cats is horrible without getting extra CPs from crits.

Rake bleeds crit for only 1.5x damage.

Improved feral charge does not work at all.

Thrash does not have any interaction with swipe at all.

Mangle debuff lasts for 12 seconds.

The mangle ability you get at lvl 10 is the mangle debuff and not the actual mangle attack.

Faerie fire (cat) doesn't exist.

Bleeds do not scale with haste.

Energy regen does not scale with haste.

Nom Nom Nom does not function (does nothing for rip duration less than 25%)

Shred's cost is not reduced

There is no crit damage multiplier for cats (so it's base 200%)

Ferals lost 10% AP

No improved leader of the pack - no mana regen or health.

Innervate scales with the caster's mana, not the target.

Pulverize still does almost no damage compared to maul.

Mangle does very little damage compared to maul.

Swipe's scaling is horrible and does about 1/4 the damage it does on live

faerie fire costs 15 rage

Savage Defense scales statically with AP.

Some of these will be addressed really soon. Others will be addressed as we figure out balance. In any case, it's not exactly fun to play a feral right now; you have to spam claw.

That's right, claw.

It'll get better. Don't panic! But don't think that things are all that hawt right now. If I don't mention a lot, it's because there's not a lot to mention.

Posts like this make me want to close my eyes and cover my ears and go "LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" and just wait until things are different in a few weeks. Innocence is bliss. What I never knew can't hurt me.

No, sorry, yes they want choice, but not when the choice is "let me take 5 talent points that IN NO WAY give my form a bonus just to move to the next tier".

These trees are way to far from finished, and as I said in my post, if 2 patches from now even 1/4 of the talents look anything like they do right now, I will have lost all faith in blizzard knowing what they want to do with bears.

At this point I would not be surprised if druids became the hear class of cataclysm and now have 4 trees. Because looking at the warrior trees I cried at how good they were.

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#0ZGcbubRrMMhobh

my cat build

Primal Fury is shocking, this must just be an oversight. Unless what I said in my post is true, they want FB to be a true execute, and without those extra CP from crits, you will never use FB unless you do not have to rip.

Most everything doesn't work right now. Scaling is off, damage is wrong, mangle can be cast and used as a 100-yard pull mechanism but does no damage.

fr0d, I know the design - but it still seems somehow wrong to be giving people the choice between bear talents and pvp talents. I don't care about having a choice between dps and survival - that's not usually a choice - but a cat should have more talents like nurturing instinct. It should not have more talents like Thick Hide or Pulverize as 'options'. That being said, this is far, far from being complete. Ferals were already messed up before this; they've simply not been remotely polished. I'm just hoping that I can actually level using...claw. Probably finish off the rest of Vashjir, since that'll be at least close to my level.

Just a quick question to you in the closed beta. How are bears getting their crit immunity because I am not seeing it in the talent trees being published on wowhead. Am I blind or is this another shortcoming of the first cut at the abreviated talent trees.

My guess is ferals are going back to BC numbers as cats but with the talents points to go back to a hybrid feral build of shifting back and forth from bear to cat as needed. We won't be great at either but having the flexibility of both in one build would free up a 2nd spec of either Boom or Resto.... so they better make feral leather with SP and INT too.

Honestly, I am worried we are going to get screwed in Cata... watch, to be viable fun to play DPS we are going to have to go boom. O.o

Jacemora - I really hope that's not the case. I think numbers aren't remotely close to being tweaked yet, but I don't think they want ferals to get to the point where they're bears and meh DPS. I don't think I'd mind that honestly, but I don't think they're going there.

Darksend - that'd be awesome!

Raaff - trust me, I didn't spend too much energy on it. This mostly came because of popular demand; a lot of people wanted to hear how the feral tree was going and playing.

Gingerschnaps - currently the newest version of the tree does not have FFF requiring rage, but who knows if that's the final iteration or not. FFF right now actually looks like it's in a good spot - talented, it provides 3 stacks automatically and costs no rage as well as lasting 5 minutes, making it very good for getting armor debuffs out on everyone.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.